Hon Deputy Speaker, Ministers, and Deputy Ministers, hon members, comrades and friends, fellow South Africans, last week on 11 February 2019 we, as a nation, took a pause and reflected on how far we have come since our icon and the father of our democracy, Nelson Mandela was released from prison after 27 years. In his address on 3 February 2005 in London during a campaign on making poverty history, Madiba said:
Massive poverty and obscene inequality are such terrible scourges of our times - times in which the world boasts breathtaking advances in science, technology, industry and wealth accumulation - that they have to rank alongside slavery and apartheid as social evils.
We remain on course in our journey of building a truly united, nonracial, nonsexist, democratic and prosperous society. A lot has been achieved over the last 25 years and South Africa today is much better than it was before 1994. However, as the ANC, we are the first to admit that